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Cheers Love! Upping Your Tracer Game

Fri 11th Aug 2017 - 10:33am

Tracer is and always has been a solid pick for solo DPS players. Her high risk, high reward playstyle makes her either a hero with really strong carrying potential or useless paperweight. With that said, she can be very intimidating pick for a lot of players. To be an effective Tracer, one needs a significant amount of mechanical skill and game sense, making her a deceptively hard hero to master. Let's go through a few tips and guidelines to help you get better at Tracer.

ENGAGING

This really goes without saying but even though you have top tier mobility, you should still be very careful and smart about engaging enemies.

For starters, always have at least one Blink available whenever you’re engaging the enemy team. Having Recall available is obviously gonna help, but isn’t completely necessary depending on the situation. A common mistake by Tracer players is that they use up all of their Blinks to rush the enemy, causing them to waste Recall if it fails (which it usually does).

A common misconception is that Tracer should always score kills. While she is a very capable assassin, her main role is that of a disruptor. When engaging your enemies, trying to get a single pick is still a top priority, but that’s always easier said than done. If you can isolate a healer or DPS, feel free to run up to them and unload. If you fail to get that opening pick for your team, the next best scenario is that at least one of the enemies will rush to your target’s aid. This should open up a few opportunities for your team (and maybe even yourself, if you can somehow kill the backup).

If you try to flank but can’t find anyone out of position, you can always resort to just shooting the person closest to you. Again, Tracer excels as a disruptor. The amount of damage you can do to a single person, lethal or not, should be enough to get people’s attention. Sometimes your only option is to force someone to divert their attention towards you. Always keep that in mind when flanking, especially when you’re going for the tanks. If you can’t secure a kill, you can always make them waste their defensive skills or swing their shields in your direction.

SECURING KILLS

As mentioned earlier, Tracer requires a lot of mechanical skill and game sense to be effective. To secure kills as Tracer, you’ll need to get good at tracking. For the uninitiated, tracking is basically just keeping your crosshair on your target at all times, easy enough right? In an actual match though, you’ll most likely find yourself frantically strafing and blinking around, making it difficult to track.

The best advice I can give you with regards to tracking is just get used to keeping your crosshairs on moving targets while also exploiting Tracer’s mobility yourself. If you’re having difficulty getting hits at first, try to move in the same direction of your opponent. This will usually eliminate the need to move your mouse to track, but it’s a double-edged sword as the same will apply to your enemy. Try not to make a habit out of it.

It’s all about building muscle memory, so just keep playing and adjusting your settings as you go. I’d recommend a relatively high sensitivity so you can easily do a 180 when blinking through enemies. This really boils down to personal preference and playstyle though, but I personally have my sensitivity set around the 12-15 range with a DPI of 800 when playing Tracer.

A good tip for Tracer players is to aim for the neck. Due to her high spread, aiming for the neck will ensure that you hit both the head and the body. Of course, you can easily land lots of headshots at closer ranges, so try to get good at judging which distances it’s appropriate to either aim directly for the head or the neck.

KNOW YOUR MATCHUPS

Because of how squishy Tracer is, it’s essential to have the game sense to know who and when to engage. If you ask me, Tracer is great at countering almost the entire roster. Some heroes may give you a bit of trouble, like McCree and Sombra. It’s all about baiting people’s skills and finishing them off once they’re vulnerable.

If you ask me, the only real threat to you is Sombra. If she manages to sneak up on you and get a successful hack or EMP, you’re pretty much a sitting duck. If you’re playing against a Sombra, always be on the lookout for her and pay attention to her audio cues. Remember, it only takes a single bullet to cancel her hack.

As for the rest of the roster, it’s mostly about knowing whether or not they have their skills on cooldown and promptly engaging. Did you see Genji use Deflect just a couple of seconds ago? Unload on his face then. Did McCree miss a Flashbang on you? Kill him or disengage before he can hit a headshot on you. Is Winston trying to chip away at you? Blink out of his range and aim for his large head. If he drops/dropped a barrier, then just walk away.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Hopefully these tips can help you climb the ranks as one of the strongest heroes in the game! I’m no Grandmaster Tracer player (I'm a Master support main whose DPS smurf is about to hit Diamond), but I’ve played enough mirror matches in solo queue to be able to see the difference between a decent and a mediocre Tracer. I personally still have a lot to learn, and I have my off games just like everyone else, so feel free to add your own tips or maybe even correct me in the comments down below!

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Team Dignitas was formed in September 2003, after the merger of two excellent Battlefield 1942 teams. The new ‘Dignitas’ Battlefield team went on to be very successful and after attending CeBIT (2004) we held discussions with ABIT and within a few months we had secured our first sponsor.﻿ Read More